Big Switch

[Traditionally] the Republicans were the country-club party, and the Democrats were the union-hall party. [And today] to the extent that the United States has a self-conscious proletariat, that proletariat is Republican.

I keep dreaming that Democrats would turn back to the proletariat and will stop being so subservient to the country-club snowflakes. Let’s see if my hope is justified and the 2020 nominee will represent the proletariat and not the flakes.

It gets even better:

The Republicans, for their part, have devolved from the holier-than-thou party of the Moral Majority to the prolier-than-thou party of Donald Trump, the party that talks about the “Real America” in accents purporting to be Texan but native to no part of the Lone Star State, the party ofDuck Dynastyand bad FM country music, the party of such daft rube-bait as “intelligent design,” and the party that sneers at many of the most successful parts of this country.

That’s so true. And in the meantime,

The obsession of the Democrats in 2019 is not foreign policy or fiscal policy or monetary policy butetiquette— that’s what all these Twitter-mob episodes are really about: Developing rules of speech and conduct of complexity and ferocity that would have baffled the court at Versailles. And the most successful Republican strategy in recent memory has beenflouting that etiquette.

And I honestly can’t judge anybody who is tempted to take a big steamy dump on this constantly expanding rulebook of good manners that they rich and the leisurely keep refining into eternity.

The article ends hopefully:

The Democrats’ excessive pseudo-refinement is a tendency that will eat itself soon enough. You ain’t never woke enough, so woke that you can’t be out-woked by whoever is up next. But the Republicans have a different problem: There’s always room at the bottom.

It’s true that Saturn always eats his children but it’s taking him a bit too long to eat this bunch up already. I like the optimism, though.

Like this:

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16 thoughts on “Big Switch”

“I keep dreaming that Democrats would turn back to the proletariat and will stop being so subservient to the country-club snowflakes. Let’s see if my hope is justified and the 2020 nominee will represent the proletariat and not the flakes.”

Nah! The Republicans have already gone as far off the deep end with Trump as the GOP is going — but in 2020 the Democrats are going to do a repeat of 1972 on steroids and nominate some psycho-loon that will make McGovern look like a John Bircher! 🙂

I think the article confuses veneer with substance. Yes, Trump’s base are low education whites, but he’s not doing anything for them in substance. The people served by the tax cuts are the Texas oil barons, not the oil field workers. The wall isn’t going to help the workers; it’s symbolic politics at best and worst with not substantive impact. No one is going to see his or her life improved by this great waste of money. Life expectancies in the US will keep getting shorter.

With the budget impasse, the road projects that Trump used to juice the economy before the midterm election have largely ground to a stop. Again, the people really hurting are GOP leaning voters, and they know it — construction, the military, Federal workers. The rhetoric is pro-worker, the actions are anti-worker. Trump has done nothing to address the loss of worker jobs to automation, which will be a huge issue eventually. Trump has done nothing to promote permanent employment. Even the feeble effort at a tariff war has backfired, savaging US exports, not imports, and causing companies to move manufacturing out of the US.

My view of the switch is that both parties have gone upscale, and no one is representing workers. No one cares about them. They don’t have the funds to be major donors and their turnout at the polls is flat. They are discovering that they are unrepresented, which is why polls show that Trump’s base is shrinking. As of today, 57% of registered voters say they will definitely vote against Trump in 2020 (Marist poll).

In another generation, there will be as many Chinese, Indian and Hispanic residents as there are whites in the US, and 40 million jobs will have been eliminated through automation. No one is talking about what’s actually happening.

Frankly, there’s no need to two parties to represent the wealthy. The GOP may finally have found the path to extinction.

My working assumption is that not knowing how Washington works he got burned by his own party, the tax cuts were a gesture of good faith meant to be followed by help in passing his agenda and the second the tax cuts were passed they said ‘deal? what deal? no wall no way how’
I think that’s one reason he’s digging in so hard now, he’s learned the hard way that politicians are far less trustworthy than businessmen in keeping their word…

I only wish Democrats learned from Republicans in general how to stick with their campaign promises. Democrats have a tendency to forget what they promised the second after being elected. Like Obama who was supported over Hillary on the promise of withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq yet he did the exact opposite and worse. That was a mega letdown for me personally. Plus, he never revealed during his campaigns how deeply and passionately neoliberal he was. He sold himself as the exact opposite and then it was all about servicing Wall Street.

Trump, on the other hand, is like a dog with a bone in his campaign promises. He just wouldn’t let go. I can’t avoid having a grudging admiration for that, as much as I dislike the fellow.

I also have to confess that I dislike him a lot less today than the day after the election. The guy’s been very good to Ukraine and I can’t disregard that because he doesn’t have to be. His voters very understandably don’t give a toss about Ukraine either way.

Because he doesn’t need them to donate to his campaign. He doesn’t need to go give speeches on Wall Street for money like his previous opponent. How many people soured on Hillary because of those speeches? I think a lot.

Great article (not surprising when it’s a Williamson), but I gotta point out what total bs that first paragraph is where he acts like the realignment of the parties had nothing to do with race. Black voters did start moving heavily towards the Democratic party with FDR for economic reasons. However, many stuck with Republicans until the 60s, when they abandoned the Republican party due to Nixon’s use of the Southern Strategy and Johnson’s support of Civil Rights. And white southerners, who I’ll point out are not primarily affluent suburbanites and weren’t back then either, continued voting for Democrats for president during the New Deal. The “solid south” remained pretty damn solid until 1964. Kevin D. Williamson may like to pretend his party doesn’t have a racist history, but it does. It’s not like the Democratic party has a sparkling past either, there’s no need for him to bury his head in the sand.

At least, she’s black, too. I’ve had men trying to lecture me on how to be the right kind of feminist or non-immigrants accusing me of hating immigrants. I’ve also witnessed a white academic lecturing a non-white academic on racism. It was painful to watch.